This week, there have been a whole slew and deluge of stories
coming out form the leak of 11 million documents
from a Panamanian-based law firm called Mossack Fonseca.
The release of these papers from Panama
lifts the veil on a tiny piece of the secretive offshore world.
We get an insight into how clients and banks and lawyers
go to companies like Mossack Fonseca
and say, "Okay, we want an anonymous company,
can you give us one?"
So you actually get to see the emails,
you get to see the exchanges of messages,
you get to see the mechanics of how this works,
how this operates.
Now this has already started to have
pretty immediate repercussions.
The Prime Minister of Iceland has resigned.
We've also heard news that an ally
of the brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad
has also got offshore companies.
There's been allegations of a 2 billion-dollar money trail
that leads back to President Vladimir Putin of Russia
via his close childhood friend
who happens to be a top cellist.
And there will be a lot of rich individuals our there
and other who will be nervous about the next set of stories
and the next set of leaked documents.
Now, this sounds like the plot of a spy thriller
or a John Grisham novel.
It seemed very distant from you and me ordinary people.
Why should we care about this?
But the truth is that if rich and powerful individuals
are able to keep their money offshore
and not pay the taxes that they should,
it means that there is less money for vital public services
like healthcare, education, roads,
and that affects all of us.
Now for my organization Global Witness,
this exposé has been phenomenal.
We have the world's media and political leaders
talking about how individuals can use offshore secrecy
to hide and disguise their assets,
something we have been talking about and exposing for a decade.
Now I think a lot of people find this entire world
baffling and confusing and hard to understand
how this sort of offshore world works.
I like to think of it a bit like a Russian doll.
So you can have one company stacked inside another company,
making it almost impossible to really understand
who is behind these strucutres.
It can be very difficult for law enforcement
or tax authorities, journalists, or civil society
to really understand what's going on.
I also think it's interesting that there's been
less coverage of this issue in the United States,
and that's perhaps because some prominent US people
just haven't figured in this exposé, in this scandal.
Now that's not because there are no rich Americans
who are stashing their assets offshore.
It's just because of the way in which offshore works,
Mossack Fonseca has fewer American clients.
I think if we saw leaks from the Cayman Islands
or even from Delaware or Wyoming or Nevada,
you would see many more cases and examples
linking back to Americans.
In fact, in a number of US states,
you need less information, you need to provide less information
to get a company than you do to get a library card.
That sort of secrecy in America has allowed
employees of school districts to rip off school children.
It has allowed scammers to rip off vulnerable investors.
This is the sort of behavior that affects all of us.
Now at Global Witness, we wanted to see
what this actually looked like in practice.
how does this actually work?
So what we did is we sent in an undercover investogator
to 13 Manhattan law firms.
Our investigator posed as an African minister
who wanted to move suspect funds into the United States
to buy a house, a yacht, a jet.
Now what was truly shocking was that all but one of those lawyers
provided our investigator with suggestions on how to move those suspect funds.
These were all preliminary meetings